Somewhere
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Somewhere is back, and it has new, surreal images to show you

The two-person Studio Oleomingus has resumed work on Somewhere, their first person exploration game set in an alternative Colonial India. To demonstrate, they’ve given us a new peek at an environment in their surreal polygonal world. The first screenshot shows off a car, maybe from the early ’60s, but made of wood paneling and with giant antlers poking out the top. The following slides feature several of the vehicles, clustered together like deer at a watering hole, but surrounded on four sides by walls, left without wheels and suspended in a floor that’s swamp-like but also vibrantly-patterned. the archaeological process…

Burrito Galaxy
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It might be impossible to stop grinning at Burrito Galaxy

When someone talks about nostalgia in videogames, there’s a solid chance they’ll also be talking about Metroidvanias or slick indie platformers. Super Meat Boy (2010) ends up being notable for its tight air control and precise jumps—the weird setting and throwback cutscenes are kind of a bonus. But from what I can tell, the upcoming Burrito Galaxy has nostalgia mostly for the weird worlds games let us inhabit. When the vaguely dissonant squeaks of the soundtrack from the new video started to play, I couldn’t help but grin: it sounds like someone made the Wii Shop Channel soundtrack play a game…

There You Go
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Uncover the secrets of household objects in a new puzzle game

In a previous life, There You Go would’ve been a sleeper hit on a flash portal website, where lots of different creators submitted games and animations to test out new ideas, or to show off what they could do. It feels like it has a lot in common with puzzles that were popular back then, halfway between something like the GROW series of games and an escape-the-room puzzle. Now, it’s on itch.io, and it’s the first game from Octogear, the studio name of solo developer Evyatar Amitay. the spaces are as simple and sparse as they can be For the most…

ooku
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oOku, an interactive music album about navigating dreams

Dreams aren’t particularly easy to capture in any medium. Sometimes I’ll wake up convinced I just had a dream that I’ve actually had several times but never remembered before, and at the same time, I couldn’t tell you what happened in it. Given the complicated way memories of dreams work, and the uniqueness of those emotions, it’s not surprising that a lot of work tries to negotiate that uncanny space. the line between inside and outside of the game gets blurred Set in a sequence of your friend’s dreams, oOku doesn’t end up replicating the feeling you knew something but…

Mario glitch
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See the speedrunning glitch that shows Mario the code that makes him

Games on cartridges in particular have pretty strict limitations on space. This means that there’s often a weirdness to the way their data files are organized, and speedrunners like the folks at the Awesome Games Done Quick event love to discover and exploit these in any way they can. In a video posted on Tuesday, Chris Grant showed off one of these glitchy exploits to IGN’s Jose Otero. As it turns out, in the 1992 Game Boy game Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, the data that determines how levels are shaped is right next to the data that does…

Duello
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Duello wants to be a realistic sword fighting game, but mostly it’s funny

Any videogame that aims to represent the things we can do with our bodies (i.e. attain realism) has to bring in some kind of abstraction to make it look or feel familiar. Take, for example, the Assassin’s Creed games, in which combat isn’t really meant to be realistic as much as it’s supposed to capture the frenetic fights of action movies—full of brutal sound effects and finishing moves with sweeping cameras. Likewise, there is Chivalry: Medieval Warfare (2012), one of the few games with first-person sword fighting, whose goal is to provide a robust and competitive multiplayer arena. As in a lot of multiplayer games,…

Detention
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The horror of living under martial law in 1960s Taiwan, now coming to videogames

Like a lot of the clashes between capitalist and communist factions in the early days of the Cold War, the Chinese Civil War was complex and multi-faceted. Even today, Taiwan calls itself the Republic of China, and China calls itself the People’s Republic of China. When they attend the same international events, Taiwan goes by the deliberately ambiguous title of “Chinese Taipei.” The Civil War led to a violent ideological divide, and not long after it started, Taiwan was placed under martial law mandated by the “Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion,” which lasted from 1947 until…

NEST
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NEST is a cute game poem about best bird buds

Crows, it turns out, are probably smarter than you think. They seem to be able to recognize human faces and craft tools to solve problems they run up against—the problem pretty much always being a lack of food, but still. You learn this as you play Cullen Dwyer’s new game NEST, which he gives a kind of epigraph for on its itch.io page: “Explore the forest as a crow/ and try to make friends/ with whom to find treasure and secrets.” NEST is a short game, and more than anything else it resembles Knytt or the small and atmosphere-heavy platformers…

News

Get lost in the bizarre wonder of Lilith’s collection of unfinished games

Games are mostly devoid of a “making of” genre. Indie Game: The Movie (2012) and various art books may tell the story of a game’s creation, but there is no Hearts of Darkness for games, largely because the amount of work and the number of art assets that go into a game means the “making of” commentary can’t really be strapped together out of film from the cutting room floor, or interviews from the set, or old storyboards. What can give us a look into how games come together are what Lily Zone calls “pieces of game”—in the case of her…